Reckless Endangerment

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  “You mean men? You … trick men for money?”

  “Oh course, men! Who the fuck else’s gonna pay for it?” Cindy cast an appraising eye over Fatyma. “You need to lose that coat, get you a little short jacket or something, a sweater. And boots.” Her brow wrinkled and she shook her head. “On the other hand, you look like you just got out of fucking junior high. You can use that. Get your hair in like braids, little red ribbons or something.”

  Cindy went on, seeming glad to have a rapt audience for her fashion advice as well as her considerable street experience. Fatyma, while listening, was still running her mind over the novel notion of trickery. She recalled now something she had not thought about for years. She was in a kitchen, playing under the table while her mother spoke with two older Arab women, relatives perhaps, she could not recall exactly who. The conversation had to do with some man in the old country, a farmer, before the war, and some gold, and a cow. Fatyma couldn’t remember the details, but she recalled the point, which was although men claimed all the power and made a great show of it, women were more clever and could trick men anytime they desired, and get them to do whatever they wanted. There was another story of a trick, something to do with a wedding night and blood on the sheets, and Fatyma remembered that here the women lowered their voices and glanced around to make sure no one heard, and this in itself made Fatyma ask her mother about the trick with the blood. Her mother ignored the question, and found fault with something the child did, which is what she always did when that sort of question arose, so Fatyma stopped asking.

  Now her new friend was revealing the secret. The men come by in their cars, the girl gets in, and then the trick, and money. It sounded delightful. Fatyma was thrilled, more excited than she had been by anything before. She paid her bill and accompanied Cindy to the Port Authority Bus Terminal on Forty-second and Eighth, where they checked Fatyma’s bag in a locker. By this time it was dawn. The city awoke, the terminal became crowded. Fatyma followed Cindy in what seemed like an aimless round of brief conversations with young people of unusual appearance. All of them seemed ragged and dirty and tired. They were in the habit of laughing when nothing was funny and engaging in brief spates of violence with one another, after which they seemed to forget that they had ever fought, although Fatyma heard words exchanged that would have demanded the heart’s blood of the speaker had they been voiced to an Arab.

  Cindy seemed to know a lot of people around the bus station and the neighboring streets. Several of these were black men, and Fatyma was amazed that Cindy would have conversation with hubshi, against whom Fatyma had often been warned in her old neighborhood. She supposed that here was another instance where her father had been mistaken, as these men seemed friendly, even jolly. Speaking with hubshi was clearly another part of being a whore, although when she was introduced to them by Cindy, they looked at her in a way she did not like.

  The day passed in this manner. Fatyma bought food, once at the bus station café and once at a sidewalk restaurant window, and both times Cindy invited herself along for the meal. Nearly all of Fatyma’s money was gone now, and she was starting to become worried. She voiced this fear to Cindy, adding, “Maybe we should try to trick the men tonight.”

  Cindy gave her a brief puzzled look, but the Quaalude she had just taken was working warmly within her, and her analytic abilities, never prime, were barely functioning. She shrugged and led Fatyma to the rest room at the Port Authority, where she braided the younger girl’s hair into pigtails. Ten minutes later, they were standing at a corner of Ninth Avenue and Forty-fourth Street, looking out at the quickening downtown traffic.

  “This is a good place,” she explained. “It’s not a regular stroll, so you don’t get in trouble with the real pros or the pimps. But like guys going home to Jersey sometimes like to pick up a quick blow job before they hit the tunnel back to the wife and kiddies, you know?”

  Fatyma did not know. “What is a blow job?” she asked.

  “Twenty, twenty-five bucks, whatever you can get. Okay, open your coat and stick out your tits. Jesus, you look like you’re twelve! Smile at the cars with single guys in them, and, like wave. That’s it—smile and wave.”

  Fatyma smiled and waved. Several cars slowed to take a look, and at last a dark blue Ford LTD with New Jersey plates pulled over to the curb. The electric passenger-side window hummed down.

  “Go over and stick your head in and smile,” urged Cindy. “Remember, don’t talk money until he’s got his Johnson waving, so you know he’s not a cop. Go ahead, he’s waiting! I’ll meet you back at the Port Authority.”

  The driver, a balding man in his late forties, was looking nervously over his shoulder and checking his side mirror. Fatyma entered the car, and it pulled away.

  An hour later, Cindy was sitting in the bus terminal café, sipping a lemon Coke to wash away the taste of the fellatio she had just performed on a truck driver, when Fatyma walked in, saw her, smiled, and sat down.

  “How’d you do?” Cindy asked.

  “Two hundred and twelve dollars,” said Fatyma proudly, placing a thick brown wallet on the table.

  “Jesus H. Christ! Fuck! How the fuck did you get this?”

  “I tricked him,” said Fatyma. She was glowing with excitement. “First we drove to the water, under where the road goes above …”

  “Yeah, the West Side Highway—that’s where they always go.”

  “He stopped the car. All the time I’m thinking how I will trick him, and I think I will say I am a poor orphan and need money. But he undoes his pants, you know, and …”

  Here Fatyma looked away and her cheeks darkened. She lowered her voice. “He shows his … shameful parts to me …”

  “His what!”

  “His shameful parts. So I took out my knife—actually, it is my brother’s knife, Walid—”

  “Holy shit! You had a knife?”

  “Yes, of course.” Fatyma brought it out of her coat pocket and laid it on the table. Cindy gaped. The thing was nine inches long, hiltless and gracefully curving, three inches wide at the silver-mounted ivory handle and tapering to a needle point.

  “Christ! Put it away! Put it away!” said Cindy in a frightened whisper. Fatyma did so. “And then what happened?”

  “So then he said not to hurt him because he had children, and he gave me his wallet. It was a good trick, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah, you could say that.” Cindy looked at the girl opposite as if seeing her for the first time. “Jesus! You don’t know dick, do you?”

  “No. Who is he?”

  “You never did this before, did you? Going with guys in cars?”

  “No.”

  “Then why the hell did you say you were a whore?”

  “Because this is what my father says, because I want to look like American girls, with makeup and listen to the radio music and go to movies.”

  Cindy sighed and rolled her eyes. “Girl, we got to have a long talk. But first, let’s see what we got here.” She riffled through the wallet. “Hot damn! A gold fucking VISA! Come on! If we move fast, we can score shitloads of stuff before the bastard calls it in.”

  SIX

  The thin March afternoon sunshine trickled down through the leafless trees of Columbus Park, a small patch of green located between the New York County Criminal Courts on the west and Chinatown to the east. Lucy Karp and Tran Vinh sat together on a bench and watched a group of elderly Chinese people doing tai chi exercises. As they watched, they slurped noodles from cardboard boxes. This was the child’s after-school snack. Marlene had instructed Tran to bring the girl here and wait while she performed some legal ritual in the courts. He was content with this. He was good at waiting. Lucy was not, nor was she looking forward to the afternoon’s activity, which was the purchasing of clothes for Easter. Lucy did not yet see the point of clothes.

  Tran’s glance darted in a practiced pattern across the park, covered the full circle every minute or so. Columbus Park was among the safest patches of
grass in the city, being a stone’s throw from Police Headquarters, but Tran’s wariness was by now as natural in him as a physiological function. When his gaze returned to his small charge, however, his face showed a flicker of disapproval. He thought new clothes were certainly needed. Lucy was dressed in the untidy fashion in which Americans allowed their children to go to school, a style with no respect in it, he thought, and they wondered why the children defied the teachers and learned nothing. Lucy was wearing white jeans, none too clean, scuffed Nikes, a maroon sweatshirt, with a somewhat grubby navy blue quilted parka over it. Her hair stuck out in its usual undisciplined corkscrew ringlets.

  The girl was swinging her feet under the bench, scuffing the sneakers against the rough pavement, making a rhythmic and annoying sound. He had noticed this before too: Americans seemed not to be able to control their great bodies; even the adults bounced around like huge fowls in a yard, and the children were much worse. It came, he thought, from having so much space.

  Lucy caught him looking at her and returned his stare. There were spots of grease on her nose and chin. “What?” she demanded.

  In French he replied. “Nothing. I was merely observing you destroy your shoes, and reflecting that Americans can never keep still.”

  “I’m bored,” Lucy said. “I hate clothes shopping, and I hate waiting around.”

  Tran ignored this and pointed across the park. “Look, do you see those old people? What do you think they are doing?”

  “They are doing tai chi,” Lucy answered in a bored tone.

  “Yes, and do you know why? They seek to control their bodies, to let the vital energy flow along the proper channels, and so to control their minds and avoid confusion and stupidity. The mind controls the body, but the body also controls the mind. If you let yourself flop about like a mere puppet, you will also have clouded thoughts. You will say, ‘I am bored,’ for example.”

  “I am bored. And don’t see you doing tai chi.” She said this in English, which, given their history, was mildly insulting.

  “Which leads, among other things, to impudence toward elders and failure in school. …” Seeing her firm little jaw tightening, he added, “Nor, I think, will you ever learn to shoot properly.”

  She snapped her chopsticks down and turned on him, with her face contorted into a miniature of her mother’s when enraged. The effect was so charming that he almost laughed but did not; she would not stand being laughed at, even by him, and Tran, although he had tortured any number of people, was not cruel enough to mock a child.

  “That’s not true!” she said. “I can so shoot.” She had reverted to French.

  “Anyone can shoot, but it is beneficial to also hit the target. Ah, now you are going into one of your famous blue sulks. You wish not to be treated as an infant, yet when someone gives you advice that will enable you to take on the duties of an adult, look how you behave! No, don’t hang your head like a dog, look at me! If I thought you were only another brainless American girl, I would simply watch you like a sack of rice, but, you recall, at one time I trusted you with my life and you did well, and for that reason I have responsibility for the development of your interior qualities. Your life is not to be an ordinary one, as you well know, and if you wish to live and fulfill your destiny, you must endeavor to throw off all manner of stupidity.”

  Lucy’s cheeks burned, and she found it terribly difficult to continue looking into the bottomless black eyes of the Vietnamese. She said in Cantonese, the language of their first communication, “I am sorry, Older Brother. I am stubborn unto death and a worthless person.”

  “That is true,” said Tran, “but worthless is not hopeless. If you are sincere, something may be made of you in time. Here is your mother coming.”

  “Where?” Lucy looked around in all directions and at last spotted Marlene walking into the Leonard Street entrance to the park. “Oh, there she is,” she said, switching back to French. “You have good eyes, Uncle Tran.”

  “On the contrary, I have terrible old eyes, and one of them hardly works at all. However, I know how to look, which makes a difference.”

  “What do you mean? Looking is just looking.”

  “To ignorant girls, yes. To those who flop their arms and legs about and chatter like sparrows, it is just looking. But there is a way to look that lets you see what is important, for example, that lets you see your enemy before being seen.”

  “How?” This was beginning to sound interesting to Lucy, who had seen the Star Wars trilogy and had thus absorbed, along with the rest of the American population, a belief in miraculous powers taught (in a convenient seven minutes of screen time) by wizened, elderly beings.

  But Tran said, “It may be possible to teach you when you have learned to sit properly and to breathe. And when your demeanor has become sufficiently respectful. Tell me, why do you dislike purchasing clothing with your mother?”

  “Because she makes me buy things I don’t like.”

  “You astound me. I am no great judge, but your mother appears to me quite chic, when she wishes.”

  “Oh, yes, she is, but she wants me to wear these little dresses. She doesn’t care if I look like a dork.”

  “A dork! What is this dork?”

  “Oh, you know, one who is not respected, like … like…”

  “Un fayot, perhaps?” Tran offered. She shrugged. “In any case,” he continued, “you appear to value the opinions of your school fellows more than the wishes of your mother. Thus you appear in the clothes of an unemployed laborer rather than those of a well-brought-up schoolgirl. I have seen this often in America, but fail to understand the reason for it. In my country, families would go without rice to enable their children to wear clothes to school that would not bring disgrace. In any case, you must honor your mother’s wishes. Your friends will come and go, but nothing can replace a parent.”

  At this moment the irreplaceable arrived, looking chic enough in her best gray wool going-to-court suit, heels and stockings with a worn Burberry trench coat on top. After kissing her child and greeting Tran with the accustomed formal handshake, she passed him a slip of paper. It contained a man’s name and address.

  “An interview?” asked Tran mildly.

  “Not at this time. Make your presence known and leave our cards in appropriate places. He needs to know someone is watching him, as he is watching our client.”

  Marlene and Lucy then took the subway to Bloomingdale’s, where Lucy evinced an agreeableness so nearly angelic that Marlene readily consented to Lucy’s request that she be allowed to go shooting with Tran on the weekend.

  Which came, the clear weather continuing. Lucy disappeared with Tran, Marlene had a much coveted spate of concentrated mothering with her babies because Posie had the Saturday off, and Karp, as was his habit, went off to play basketball at the West Fourth Street courts.

  Karp had been doing this nearly every Saturday for over a decade, with the only breaks coming during the year he had spent in Washington and the six months after he got his artificial left knee. He was well known, therefore, and always got some action, although he no longer played in the hottest games, which at West Fourth are hot indeed: it is known among New York playground basketball fanatics as Death Valley. NBA players have been known to play there, and they do not have an easy time.

  While Karp still enjoyed playing, he did not want to be knocked to the asphalt and he did not want to do a lot of full-court running and he could not jump at all anymore. He enjoyed instead intellectual half-court games with a rotating group of a dozen or so old farts who remembered the early Red Auerbach teams, and when City College was a basketball powerhouse, and when big-time basketball was not a contact sport like hockey. Karp liked position, passing, and floating long, graceful shots through the hoop from twenty feet out.

  After his first such game that morning, Karp sat against the fence with a towel around his neck, sucking on an icy Yoo-Hoo, enjoying the loose, hot feeling in his limbs and the biting pain in his back teet
h, and watching the more athletic contest that was now going on on one of the full courts. His attention was drawn to one of the odd mismatches common in playground games: an Irish-looking man of average height was guarding a black man with five inches on him and a full step of speed. The Irish guy was getting the hell beat out of him, but not as much as he should have, because he stuck to the bigger man like a cocklebur, his teeth gritted with effort. Karp could see the sweat flying off him in sheets, although it was a cool March day. And he was using his brains, psyching out the other man’s fakes, countering to the extent he could the other man’s superior athletic skills. His team lost anyway.

  When the man came over to the fence to retrieve a towel he had shoved into the chain-link, Karp said, “Nice game,” and realized that the man was Jim Raney.

  “I got creamed,” said Raney, wiping his face. He went out to the snack wagon parked outside the gate and came back with an orange soda.

  “I’m surprised to see you here,” Karp remarked as Raney sat down beside him. “I thought you lived in Queens.”

  “Just moved this month. I got a deal on a condo in Clinton, or Hell’s Kitchen, as my old man still calls it. He thinks I’m a nut case. ‘Jimmy, what is it, are you broke, have you lost your job?’ They busted their humps to get out to Woodlawn, and here I am going back again. I like being in the city, though.”

  “The culture,” Karp said.

  Raney laughed. “Yeah. That and ten minutes to work instead of an hour.”

  They talked casually for a while, watching the games and commenting on the plays, in the careful, polite way that men do when one of them is a close friend of the wife of the other, as Raney was of Marlene. So, talking in this wary way, with a part of his mind focused on gently pumping the detective a bit about the sequel to the blowup in Roland’s office, and the identity of the floating Arab corpse, a memory rose up like a scrap of dirty paper in the gutters after a rain. Karp snatched at it and said, “Ali something, Ali al something … Haddad mentioned it. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before.”